Vax 11/780 performance vs Sun 4/280 performance

[Stephen J. Friedl]

In article <6963 at cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>, mangler at cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (Don Speck) writes:
>
> But they [parallel-head disks, I think] can be simulated with
> ordinary disks by striping across multiple controllers, *if* the
> disks rotate as one.  Does anyone know of a cost-effective disk
> that can phase-lock its spindle motor to that of a second disk,
> or perhaps with the AC line?

I think Micropolis has done this with a handful of their 700MB drives.
They put nine drives into a rack, use a special synchronizing controller,
and give you striped drives.  The ninth drive was for parity, and if
a drive failed, you could pull out the bad one and drop in the new
one: the controller would reconstruct the parity drive.  Sorry, I don't
have a reference...
-- 
Steve Friedl    V-Systems, Inc. (714) 545-6442      3B2-kind-of-guy
friedl at vsi.com     {backbones}!vsi.com!friedl    attmail!vsi!friedl

Nancy Reagan on the Mac-II architecture: "Just say Nu"